The Speed of Life

I have learned over the years, and I am sure my professors who have had to read my work will agree,  that I am what they call a stream of conscious writer meaning that I have little regard for order, structure, and proper punctuation and just let the thoughts and ideas racing through my mind hit the page as they come. I am sure that this blog will follow this same trend as I try and take thoughts and put them into snippets for the blog. I will get back to telling stories about this summer and the adventures of striking it out alone in the big city of Newberry later but today this is my food for thought post inspired partially by my experiences and partially by the TV show “Richard Hammond’s Invisible Worlds”.

                 It takes 50 milliseconds for our eyes to blink and it takes 150 milliseconds for our brain to process an image our eyes see. What these numbers mean is that there is a delay and that many things happen right before our eyes that our brain cannot process quickly enough to allow us to comprehend. For example when an explosion occurs we see the explosion and the debris associated with it but we do not see the shockwave. The shockwave is not “invisible” because it is impossible to see air molecules being displaced as many would assume, I mean air this invisible substance all around us who would believe that the movements of its molecules could be seen by anything. The shockwave is “invisible” to us simply because it all occurs at a rate too fast for our brain to comprehend but when filmed with a high speed camera this “invisible” force can suddenly be seen clear as day.

In my experiences with nature the speed of life can create true enjoyment and utter frustration. I love when I get a chance encounter with wildlife whether it be walking through the woods or from the seat of a car. There is such a beauty to watching a porcupine slowly waddle around on the ground or sway in a tree top eating to his hearts content. And time seems to slow down when you watch a bald eagle take off from the tree tops, circle, and then dive to the water presumable grabbing a fish before heading back to its roost, I was lucky enough to watch this happen from a boat at work last week. But then there are these moments, these encounters that happen in the blink of an eye that you wish could and would last longer that time would slow down. I am of course not talking about encounters with animals like turtles those you can usually make last for as long as you desire. I am talking about the bald eagles that swoop out of trees right above your head and disappear into the sky before you fully comprehend what just happened, or the bobcat that flashes across the forest road right in front of you as you drive along. I know I saw a bobcat because the size of the blur and the way that it moved were undeniably that of a bobcat but my eyes were only able to capture it as a blur. Those are the moments you wish you could slow down. My brother recently asked me “What do you mean you “think” you saw a bear today?” My explanation was that I saw the back flank of something black that fit the size profile of a bear disappear into the woods. It all happened so fast that I could not rationally think through what I was seeing as it happened but I know that what I saw couldn't be anything but a bear.

This all leads me to the question that I will leave you with. If you think about your experiences you will have some understanding of how this delay in the brain processing the image we see can feel. We have all hat that moment driving down the road and there is nothing on the side of the road and suddenly there is a deer standing there and  startles you because it seems to have just appeared out of thin air. My question is how much of the information that the eye takes in between the images processed by the brain do we in some way retain. The harder I tried to visualize what I saw when I saw the bear the more I seemed to grasp details that I know weren’t processed in that first initial thought of I am seeing a bear. Some may say that our brains create details based in expectation to fill the gaps between the images which may be true but think back to an experience you have had  that happened at the speed of life and I assure you that the more you think about it the more details will become clear to you. Is our brain capable of background processing what we don’t initially see and providing us some detail to draw upon when we look back?